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5 secrets of Sheppard's that Sheppard doesn't know Lorne's discovered
1. Sheppard’s still trying to find Ford. Lorne’s not sure that’s exactly a secret, but the star chart with possible sightings recorded on it probably is. Lorne found it buried in a sub-folder of the military admin drive, labeled ‘interplanetary migration of wooly mammoths,’ which isn’t the greatest cover ever, but then, no-one but Lorne and Sheppard ever get that deep into the admin files. If Sheppard’s noticed that Lorne’s added three possible sightings, he hasn’t mentioned it yet.
2. Sheppard’s sleeping with Cameron Mitchell, and they’re neither of them as careful about keeping it a secret as they should be. Which is how Lorne knows: there’s not a lot of room for misinterpretation in the way they look at each other whenever Sheppard’s leaving Earth.
3. When the rest of his team were kidnapped on P3J 726, Sheppard traded the location of an ex-Genii they’d helped repatriate in order to get them back. Everyone knows he did something extreme, because he came back through the gate looking worse than the rest of his team, but Lorne’s the only one who saw Sheppard at the computer and got curious. He’s pretty sure Sheppard’s team don’t know what he did, and Lorne wants to tell Sheppard, just so he doesn’t have to carry the secret all on his own, but he’s afraid of what his face would like look while he did.
4. Sheppard started keeping lemon cookies in the bottom drawer of his desk when they all came back after being evicted by the Ancients. The packets are never opened, though they’re always replaced before they might start going moldy, and Lorne honestly has no idea what to make of it. Given McKay’s very vocal citrus allergy, he can’t believe they don’t have some kind of significance, but he’s got no clue what it might be.
5. Sheppard’s been emailing his brother with every databurst since his father’s funeral. Lorne doesn’t know that he’s the only other person who knows this, and he doesn’t know that Sheppard would be upset to find out that Lorne knows, because Sheppard doesn’t want anyone to know how much he regrets losing touch. All Lorne knows is that, halfway through the week in which they were down a computer and sharing, he nudged the mouse to turn the screen saver off and found an email starting, Hi Dave, thanks for the pictures. Your girls got mom’s hair, huh? At which point he got up and went to bug Zelenka about increasing the jumpers’ top speed, because for all the things he knew without meaning to, it was nice to have something he didn’t know.
5 aliens Cam will never forget
1. Jolan of the Sodan. Because he might have run Cam into the ground, but in the end, he took care of Cam and saved his life, which was very nearly more than the SGC could be bothered to do. And because the Sodan stood up to the Ori and were wiped out, and Cam will never be able to stop feeling like he’s partly to blame, like they wouldn’t have done it if Jolan hadn’t known him so well.
2. Tarvia the Ancient. Cam’s never met him, never will because he ascended from Earth hundreds of years ago. But one of the junior anthropologists at the SGC spent three years trying to trace the ancestors of the ATA gene carriers back to the Ancients they came from, and she found twelve of them with Tarvia in their line, including John. Which means Tarvia is, in his slightly slutty way, responsible for John coming back into Cam’s life, which is pretty much worth remembering.
3. Dr Marrell. And Reya, of course, but mainly Marrell. Seeing Reya’s broken body and believing he’d killed her is starting to fade, but he can’t forget Marrell, how much he must have been hurting to do what he did. Cam doesn’t exactly feel sorry for him, after he killed Reya and put the memory of it in Cam’s head, but the confusion and anger and hurt he feels when he thinks of the scientist won’t go away.
4. Cicero from the museum. He reminds Cam of Jackson, all that belief in something no-one else believes in, all that intellectual curiosity and desire to help, to make other people see. And although Cam gets Walter to dial Cicero’s planet every month, they never get a reply, and Cam can’t stop thinking about how it must feel to *know* what’s out there and not be able to touch it. He knows he couldn’t bear it; the need to be part of that is a huge part of why he’s not in a wheelchair right now.
5. Teal’c and Vala. Which, sure, makes six, but he thinks of them together, thinks of them as part of the team, not really as aliens except for sometimes. When Teal’c gives him that long, slow look of ‘you are young and foolish,’ despite not looking that much older than Cam. When Vala says something that reminds him that she was possessed by a Goa’uld for years. It’s the differences that get him still, or maybe it’s just the wondering if one day they’ll get fed up with how they’re treated by the SGC, on Earth, and go back. Because he’s never sure that, in their place, he wouldn’t.
5 Earth customs Vala can't understand
1. Independence Day. She likes the fireworks, and the team barbeques are fun, but what’s the point of celebrating independence from another landmass on the same planet? Eventually, they’ll face something too big coming at them, and no-one’s going to care who’s independent then.
2. Shaking hands. Daniel says it used to be to prove people didn’t have swords up their sleeves, but really, who’d be that obvious with their concealed weapons? If they’re trying to make sure they won’t be attacked, they’d be better off shaking their new acquaintance upside down by their ankles. Mitchell collapses into a completely charming fit of giggles when she says this to him.
3. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. For one thing, if it’s supposed to be keeping gay people out of the military, it’s a spectacular failure, judging by the people she knows. And for another, it just takes all the fun out of meeting the new soldiers – they get all nervous and twitchy, when she’s going for flushed and amused.
4. Tipping. She’s used to world’s where the price of everything is relative, and she’s used to planets where the price of everything is set. What she doesn’t see if the point of a world where the price of everything is set, including the price for the job you do, and then there’s this one thing that’s relative. She’s past looking for logic in what the people of Earth do, but really, would it kill them to make sense just once?
5. Sneaking out of the infirmary. It’s more, she thinks, of a military custom than an Earth one, but her experience of Earth is more of the military than the general population. She’s only been in the infirmary a few times, but she likes it: she gets to lie around while attractive people take care of her and her friends bring her gifts. When the others sneak out, they get frowned at, told off, and eventually sent back in, where they have to lie around under close supervision. Vala’s way, you skip the bad stuff and draw out the good stuff, and that’s what life ought to be about, in her opinion.
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Which is a long way of saying, sorry, I'm no help!